Holidays get off to a helpful start

A team of young volunteers will hit the streets next week as part of a community-minded youth camp.

The 180 teenage volunteers will spend the first week of their school holidays at the Junction 12 camp, based at Rushall Farm near the M4 and organised by more than 20 Reading churches.

They will be involved in activities ranging from drama and sport to learning how to cook, and will spend Wednesday, July 28, helping conservation and

community projects right across the town.

Volunteers will be giving a fresh lick of paint to accommodation for homeless people through the Reading Single Homeless Project, doing conservation work in Dinton Pastures with the Wokingham District Countryside Service, and visiting retired people in sheltered accommodation.

“We think it will be a really good thing to do – good for the community and really good for the young people,” said Richard Watkins, who has been helping organise the helpful afternoon.

“It feels good and enjoyable to do things for other people, and getting the young people involved will be a really positive experience for them.”

He said the wide variety of projects they will be helping with had been chosen in part because it would be easy to see the results of all the hard work.

“They will be able to look at the state of a house before they start work and then see the

improvement afterwards. Seeing the impact they can have on the community will be really

enjoyable and will help them develop as people,” Mr Watkins said.

He also said it was important that the work the volunteers did had real meaning and was not just arranged to give them something to do.

“We didn’t want to be a burden by forcing people to come up with things to keep us occupied,” he said. “It was more a case of phoning around and saying ‘This is who we are, we have all these people, how can we help?’ The idea is to be genuinely useful.”

The youngsters will be rewarded with a party and bonfire on Wednesday night and a lie-in and fried breakfast awaits them on Thursday morning.